Never mind that they had before and probably would again. Why did they say these things when they all knew them to be untrue? But Suzanne and Victor were nodding along as though they didn’t know as well as she it was all lies, as if any of them believed what she had said. Was it because the truth was too unpalatable to bear? Like lying to the children about Father Christmas, only they were lying to themselves, trying to make themselves believe that the old rules still applied.
“It could wait until morning,” suggested Suzanne, uneasy. “Until light. Even Father Christmas loses his way sometimes.”
“Especially with his wounded foot,” said her father, expressionless.
He was testing her. She wasn’t sure why, but he was.
“Do you need a light?” asked Victor.
“No. I know the way well enough.” What was a twisted ankle among friends? She didn’t need her father to tell her that to carry a light would be folly. She might as well pose as a grouse and invite hunters to take turns shooting at her. “I won’t be long.”
Another lie. She had no idea how long she’d be.
It felt colder outside than before, the air crisp with the scent of frost. Once out of the old walls, through the gap her father had shown her when she was a child, it was almost eerily silent.
No bells. The Germans had torn the bells from the church, had shipped them to Germany to be melted into instruments of war.
But no, that wasn’t it. It took her a moment to realize that the shelling had stopped. For the first time in months, the guns from the front had fallen silent.
It ought to have been beautiful, but it wasn’t. It was eerie, terrifying. She felt like a rabbit in a clearing, caught out of concealment.
Through the silence, she heard the crunch of footsteps on the hard ground and froze. Not just footsteps. Boots. German boots. A man in uniform appeared at the other end of the lane, by the graveyard, where the walnut trees no longer grew.
“Don’t shoot!” It seemed really quite imperative not to die just now. “I can explain!”
The steps quickened, the moonlight glinting off the silver insignia on a peaked cap. “Aurélie?”
“Lieutenant von Sternburg. Max.” Aurélie gulped in air, the cold burning her lungs. The nearness of her escape made her dizzy. She resisted the urge to sit down hard on the cold ground, holding tight to her basket instead. “What are you doing out here? Shouldn’t you be feasting on stolen brandy and plundered geese?”
“I hadn’t the stomach for it.” The moonlight played tricks, obscuring familiar features, but his voice was the same, cultured, rueful. “What have you got there?”
Aurélie shifted the basket in her arms, twisting it away. “Some nuts for the children. That’s all. They’re from our own store.”
She couldn’t see his face, but she could sense his sudden stillness, hear the change in his voice. “Did you think I was going to report you to the major?”
“I—I don’t know.” She had hurt him. It seemed strange to feel guilty for it, when he was one of the conquerors, one of the barbarians. “You have your duties. If you aren’t going to report me—then I have some packages to deliver.”
“For the children?” Max shook his head. “You’re too late.”
“Too late?” A hundred horrid images scrolled through Aurélie’s cider-fuzzed brain. “Wait. You don’t mean—”
“Don’t look like that! It’s nothing like that. All I meant was, Father Christmas already came.”
“He did?” Aurélie looked up at him, the meaning of his words finally sinking in. “I thought—I thought he had a wounded foot.”
Max smiled unevenly. “He managed to hobble out of bed. He brought little enough. Chocolates. Tops. Balls. But something.”
Aurélie gave up the pretense. “Why?” she demanded, staring up at him, trying to make out his expression in the moonlight. “Why?”
“Father Christmas wouldn’t . . . ,” he began, and then stopped. “Why? I don’t believe in making war on children. There’s so little that’s truly precious. To destroy like this—to take away their peace, their innocence—how can we do that? This isn’t what war ought to be.”
“What ought it be?” There was a bench by the denuded graveyard. Aurélie sat on it, feeling the shock of cold straight through her dress and drawers. “Two rows of men shooting at each other?”
“Yes!” Max’s face was earnest in the moonlight. “Exactly that. Men who chose what they chose, fighting by recognizable rules. Not—not this trampling of innocents for sport!”
His confusion made something twist in her chest. She had been like that, too, what felt like a very long time ago. She had thought that war was bugles and glory. Jean-Marie had known otherwise the last time he saw her, had tried to tell her. But she had ignored him.
Aurélie thought of the stories that had nourished her childhood: their glorious ancestor who had followed Joan of Arc, her father dashing into battle against the Prussians. But those were only the bits they sewed into the tapestries, sanitized and edited.
“Was it ever otherwise, do you think?”
Max let out a long sigh, folding his tall body onto the bench beside her. “Probably not. Not if you believe Voltaire, at any rate. Candide asks if men have always massacred each other, if they have ‘always been liars, cheats, traitors, ingrates, brigands, idiots, thieves, scoundrels’ and so forth. His friend replies, ‘Have hawks always eaten pigeons?’”
“Your commanding officer has banned pigeons,” Aurélie pointed out. “So the hawks might be out of luck.”
Max choked on a laugh. “This is a metaphorical pigeon.”
“I don’t believe that makes a difference,” said Aurélie. “It’s contraband, all the same. You’d best get rid of it.”
Max stifled a yawn, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand. “Shall I put it in the book? Item: one pigeon, metaphorical, executed. Of course, that raises the question of how one executes a metaphorical pigeon.”
It was the sort of debate they used to carry on by the hour in her mother’s salon. Aurélie had never been part of those discussions; no one had ever thought her worth having them with. And, to be fair, she had thought it all nonsense, pointless nothings. Now there was something strangely bittersweet about it. It felt like a luxury to sit here, in the dark, in the cold, and talk nonsense. “How does one execute a metaphorical pigeon?”
Max stretched his long legs out in front of him. Aurélie could see the mist of his breath in the cold air, the rise and fall of the silver buttons on his coat. “By removing all irony,” he said at last. “Killing all thought. Draining dry wit. Reducing the world to the imposition of blind obedience, with no sense or justice in it. No kindness. No mercy.”
Aurélie glanced up at him sideways. “How did we get from pigeons to this?”
He grimaced. “How did we get from anything to this?”
“I keep wondering that, too,” Aurélie admitted. “I had thought, at the beginning, that it would be a few weeks, and then everything could go back to normal. But now . . . I don’t even remember what normal was anymore.”